Cisco Threat Research Blog

Update 2015-08-21: This post has been updated to reflect an additional advisory released on August 20.

Talos, in conjunction with Apple’s security advisories issued on August 13 and August 20, has released six advisories for vulnerabilities that Talos found in Apple Quicktime. In accordance with our Vendor Vulnerability Reporting and Disclosure policy, these vulnerabilities have been reported to Apple and CERT.  This post serves as a summary for the advisories being released in coordination with Apple and CERT.

Ryan Pentney and Richard Johnson of Talos are credited with the discovery of these vulnerabilities.

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Microsoft has released their monthly set of security bulletins designed to address security vulnerabilities within their products. This month’s release sees a total of 14 bulletins released which address 58 CVEs. Four bulletins are rated “Critical” this month and address vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer, Graphics Component, Office, and Edge. The other ten bulletins are rated “Important” and address vulnerabilities within Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), Server Message Block (SMB), XML Core Services, Mount Manager, System Center Operations Manager, UDDI Services, Command Line, WebDAV, Windows, and the .NET Framework. (more…)

This post was authored by Mahdi Namazifar and Yuxi Pan

Once a piece of malware has been successfully installed on a vulnerable system one of the first orders of business is for the malware to reach out to the remote command-and-control (C&C) servers in order to receive further instructions, updates and/or to exfiltrate valuable user data. If the rendezvous points with the C&C servers are hardcoded in the malware the communication can be effectively cut off by blacklisting, which limits the malware’s further operation and the extent of their damage.

To avoid such static detection mechanisms recent attackers have been taking advantage of various Domain Generation Algorithms (DGA) in choosing and updating the domain names of their C&C servers. DGA embedded in the malware generate a large amount of pseudo-random domain names within a given period, most of which are nonexistent. With the same random seed, e.g. time of the day or most popular tweets of the day, the attackers can generate exactly the same list of domain names remotely, among which they will only register a few. The malware will contact some or all of the domains generated by the DGA, giving its opportunity to be able to connect to the C&C server. The sheer amount of nonexistent domains produced by the DGA on a daily basis presents a great burden for security specialists if blacklisting is still to be pursued.

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This post was authored by Nick Biasini with contributions from Craig Williams & Alex Chiu

Update 8/1: To see a video of this threat in action click here

Adversaries are always trying to take advantage of current events to lure users into executing their malicious payload. These campaigns are usually focussed around social events and are seen on a constant basis. Today, Talos discovered a spam campaign that was taking advantage of a different type of current event.

Microsoft released Windows 10 earlier this week (July 29) and it will be available as a free upgrade to users who are currently using Windows 7 or Windows 8. This threat actor is impersonating Microsoft in an attempt to exploit their user base for monetary gain. The fact that users have to virtually wait in line to receive this update, makes them even more likely to fall victim to this campaign.

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Talos is releasing an advisory for multiple vulnerabilities that have been found within the Total Commander FileInfo Plugin. These vulnerabilities are local denial of service flaws and have been assigned CVE-2015-2869. In accordance with our Vendor Vulnerability Reporting and Disclosure policy, these vulnerabilities have been disclosed to the plugin author(s) and CERT.  This post serves as a summary of the advisory.

Credit for these discoveries belongs to Marcin Noga of Talos.

TALOS-2015-024/CVE-2015-2869

An attacker who controls the content of a COFF Archive Library (.lib) file can can cause an out of bounds read by specifying overly large values for the ‘Size’ field of the Archive Member Header or the “Number Of Symbols” field in the 1st Linker Member. The second half of the vulnerability concerns an attacker who controls the content of a Linear Executable file can cause an out of bounds read by specifying overly large values for the “Resource Table Count” field of the LE Header or the “Object” field at offset 0x8 from a “Resource Table Entry”. An attacker who successfully exploits this vulnerability can cause the Total Commander application to unexpectedly terminate.

These vulnerabilities has been tested against FileInfo 2.21 and FileInfo 2.22.

Product URL

http://www.totalcmd.net/plugring/fileinfo.html

Finding and disclosing zero-day vulnerabilities responsibly helps improve the overall security of the devices and software people use on a day-to-day basis.  Talos is committed to this effort via developing programmatic ways to identify problems or flaws that could be otherwise exploited by malicious attackers. These developments help secure the platforms and software customers use and also help provide insight into how Cisco can improve its own processes to develop better products.

For further zero day or vulnerability reports and information visit:
http://talosintel.com/vulnerability-reports/

Today, Microsoft has released their monthly set of security bulletins designed to address security vulnerabilities within their products. This month’s release sees a total of 14 bulletins being released which address 57 CVEs. Four of the bulletins are listed as Critical and address vulnerabilities in Windows Server Hyper-V, VBScript Scripting Engine, Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and Internet Explorer. The remaining ten bulletins are marked as Important and address vulnerabilities in SQL Server, Windows DCOM RPC, NETLOGON, Windows Graphic Component, Windows Kernel Mode Driver, Microsoft Office, Windows Installer, Windows, and OLE.

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This post was authored by Nick Biasini

Talos is constantly observing malicious spam campaigns delivering various different types of payloads. Common payloads include things like Dridex, Upatre, and various versions of Ransomware. One less common payload that Talos analyzes periodically are Remote Access Trojans or RATs. A recently observed spam campaign was using freeware remote access trojan DarkKomet (a.k.a DarkComet). This isn’t a novel approach since threat actors have been leveraging tools like DarkKomet or Hawkeye keylogger for quite sometime.

Some interesting techniques in this campaign were used by the threat actor to bypass simplistic sandbox methods including use of sub folders, right to left override, and excessive process creation. This threat also had surprising longevity and ample variations, used over time, to help ensure the success of the attack.

What is DarkKomet?

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This post was authored by Rich Johnson, William Largent, and Ryan Pentney. Earl Carter contributed to this post.

Cisco Talos, in conjunction with Apple’s security advisory issued on June 30th,  is disclosing the discovery of a remote code execution vulnerability within Apple Quicktime. This vulnerability was initially discovered by the Talos Vulnerability Research & Development Team and reported in accordance with responsible disclosure policies to Apple.

There is a remote code execution vulnerability in Apple Quicktime (TALOS-2015-0018/CVE-2015-3667). An attacker who can control the data inside an stbl atom in a .MOV file can cause an undersized allocation which can lead to an out-of-bounds read. An attacker can use this to create a use-after-free scenario that could lead to remote code execution.

There is a function within QuickTime (QuickTimeMPEG4!0x147f0) which is responsible for processing the data in an hdlr atom. There is a 16-byte memory region, allocated near the beginning of the function, if the hdlr subtype field in an mdia atom is set to ‘vide’, this reference is passed to a set of two functions.

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This post was authored by Earl Carter.

Attackers are constantly looking for ways to monetize their malicious activity. In many instances this involves targeting user data and accounts. Talos continues to see phishing attacks targeting customers of multiple high profile financial institutions.  In the past couple of months, we have observed phishing attacks against various financial customers including credit card companies, banks, credit unions, and insurance companies, as well as online businesses such as Paypal and Amazon. These phishing attacks have gone old-school in that they either attach an HTML document or include HTML data in the actual email to present the user with official looking pages that appear to be from the actual businesses being targeted.

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